Category: LETTERS Page 58 of 274

To Robert Shaw Barlow
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Paris. June 22, 1936

I have just finished Faulkner’s “Sanctuary” and I think I have understood all the pornographic part, corncob, etc, and the character of Popeye which is like any villain in melodrama, just as Miss Reba and her establishment and her genteel friends entertained after the funeral; all this being very well done, so as to seem . . . life-like, at least to the uninitiated. I found myself also absorbed in the story as a whole, without exactly following the thread of it, which it would have taken me a second reading to disentangle. But frankly I don’t think it worth bothering about. Like all these recent writers, the author is too lazy and self-indulgent and throws off what comes to him in a sort of dream, expecting the devoted reader to run about after him, sniffing at all the droppings of his mind. I am not a psychological dog, and require my dog-biscuit to be clearly set down for me in a decent plate with proper ceremony. But Faulkner, apart from those competent melodramatic or comic bits, has a poetic vein that at times I liked extremely; in describing landscape or sheer images. This matter of images is very interesting, but confused. The image-without-thought poets often jump from the images supposed to appear to a particular observer, as in a dream, to images visible only to another observer, to the author in his omniscient capacity, as if they were the substance of the physical world common to all sane people. But there are no common images; there are only common objects of belief: and confusion in this matter of psychological analysis renders these modern writers bewildering, because they are themselves bewildered.

Faulkner’s language I like well enough when it is frank dialect, or unintended poetry: but I wish he wouldn’t, in his own person, say “like” for “as”, “like they do down South”. And the trick of being brutally simple and rectilinear in describing what people do, or rather their bodily movements, becomes tiresome after a while; especially when these bodily movements have no great significance but again are mere images strung along because they happen to appear to the author’s undirected fancy.

The absence of moral judgements or sentiments helps to produce this impression of conscious automata, wound up, and running round and round in their cages. I think there is biological truth in that view, but we have also a third, a vertical, dimension. We can think: and it is in that dimension that experience becomes human.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel Savoia
Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. June 21, 1937

Capital that you should have come to know so characteristic a man as Ezra Pound at close quarters. Will you tell me, or can you draw from him, how he connects his sympathy with Eliot and with Mussolini with his otherwise extreme romantic anarchism?

My journey had uncomfortable features: it rained hard in Venice, and during the first day they had no suitable room for me at Danieli’s; but I got one in the evening, and no unpleasant consequences followed. The motorbus coming here was absolutely full up, complete, and I was so squeezed next to another fat old man that I had to have my clothes pressed, something which as you know I don’t ordinarily do. However, the weather that day was lovely, and the ‘bus was able to pull us up the steep hills on good time.

Here I am tolerably well settled, have an electric stove in case of cold weather, and a pleasant enough outlook. My books from Blackwell’s have arrived and I am in harness; working on Dom. & P.rs; but nothing prevents me from thinking or writing about Spirit if the spirit itself should prompt. I have also brought from Rome The Marble Faun and The House of the Seven Gables, cut up for the pocket, to read when I have my coffee or tea in the town. Have nearly finished the first, and am disappointed. Hawthorne has moments of dramatic intuition. There is a scene at the Capuchins’ in Rome which I wish Shakespeare had written and not Hawthorne: but his mind in general is weak and helplessly secondary: more a slave of his time than Poe.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.

To William Roscoe Thayer
60 Brattle Street
Cambridge, Massachusetts. [June 20, 1901]

Dear Mr Thayer,

My [Phi Beta Kappa] poem is probably coming out in the autumn in a new volume of verses which Scribner is publishing for me. I don’t know whether they will like or dislike the idea of having the piece appear simultaneously in the Graduates’ Magazine, but I will inquire and let you know. For my part I should be delighted, although I am not sure that you will not think it sins both in length and by obscurity. However, I don’t expect to read it all, so that the audience will have only one cross to bear.

Yours very truly,
G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

To Charles Scribner’s Sons
Cambridge, Massachusetts. June 19, 1904

Gentlemen:

I am much pleased that you find the Life of Reason so promising that you will publish it on the ordinary terms; I had supposed that would hardly be possible, because it will take years, I expect, for the edition to be sold out. However, you are the best judges in such a matter, and I gladly accept your proposition to give me the ten per cent “royalty” I had no desire to intervene in the publication, and much prefer that you should undertake it yourselves, seeing you are disposed to do so.

As to publishing serially, that is of no consequence to me, and any arrangement you think best will suit me. Indeed, in one way, I find the suggestion very convenient, as the revision I am now at work on is taking longer than I expected—the book had grown up in seven years, so that it was full of repetitions and inconsistencies—and I need not send you all the MS at once. The next three books—Reason in Society, Religion, and Art— I will entrust to you before I go abroad; they will be ready, and safer in your keeping, and you can go on with the printing at such intervals as you think suitable. The last book—Reason in Science—I can send to you later, and as it is in many ways the most important it will perhaps do no harm to meditate a little longer on it before giving it a final shape.

I have tried to make the books nearly equal in length, but the attempt has been a failure: the matter could not be pressed, and I hardly wished to expand it. Book II, IV, and V, will be shorter than I, and III (Religion) a little longer. At least, I think so, although I am not good at counting words.

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, Princeton NJ.

To Richard Colton Lyon
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. June 18, 1950

I have never been a great reader of Milton and I may misjudge him: but I suspect that if I had read him more I should like him less, so that it is as well to give you only my superficial impressions. I don’t at all agree with Ezra Pound in hating him. I used to know Lycidas by heart and to delight in saying it over－E. P. might say that this explains how bad my verses were, for that was just the misguided period of my life when I wrote them. But in Paradise Lost it is not the absence of a philosophy but the evident sub-presence of a sort of mummified Old Testament philosophy that fills his sails. I admit that he is sublime in his poses: but it is the sublimity of terror not of joy. And he doesn’t understand at all the position of a real angel rebelling against a monarchical God. It would be the position of Berkeley rebelling against matter. He would not choose evil rather than good. That is only the nursery-maid’s “naughty” and “nice”. He would be choosing the immediate, the obvious, the inescapable, the Schopenhauerian “the world is my idea”, for faith of any sort which is only an impulse to bet, to jump in the dark. I am very glad to see that at the end of your essay you suggest the question what Milton understood by “the good”. He understood by it what the Calvinistic catechism calls good: the nursery-maid’s “nice” translated into the cry of superstitious escape from terror. “Duty” also needs to be analysed etymologically. It means what is owed, what you are bound by contract to perform.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.